Pot shops’ reference madness

State grants licenses then vets letters

Credit: AP

The medical-marijuana panel that awarded 20 lucrative licenses to run the state’s first pot shops didn’t verify applicants’ local letters of support until after the provisional permits were granted — another entry on a growing list of concerns that lawmakers plan to confront state health officials with next week.

“Wouldn’t this have been a part of the fundamental due-diligence process on the applicants themselves?” asked a stunned state Rep. Jeffrey Sanchez (D-Jamaica Plain), whose public-health committee is probing the licensing process at the urging of House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo (D-Winthrop).

“If the voters voted for this thing, we have to make sure we try and do it the right way,” Sanchez added, “that the dispensaries are doing what they have to do under the letter of what the voters approved.”

Several municipal officials told the Herald last night they’ve taken calls from the Department of Public Health over the past several days to confirm the authenticity of the letters, which detail either their town’s support or neutrality on a proposed dispensary or grow house.

“They wanted me to verify the letter and ask me if I wrote it,” said Richard J. White, the town administrator in Dennis, which supports a medical-marijuana dispensary run by the William Noyes Webster Foundation. He declined to say whether he thought the DPH, which called him Friday, should have vetted the letter before granting the license.

The letters, submitted in November, accounted for five of the possible 163 points in the application scoring system, a state health-department spokesman said. The provisional licenses were awarded Jan. 31.

Former state Inspector General Gregory W. Sullivan said the failure to confirm the letters before granting the licenses “demonstrates a remarkable lack of due diligence that the officials were obligated to show.”

“The governor and Legislature gave them authority to administer the application process fairly and with integrity,” said Sullivan, now a research director with the Pioneer Institute. “And what we’ve been seeing is a series of shortcomings, and it’s very discouraging.”

The Herald reported last week that one of the licensees, Green Heart Holistic Health & Pharmaceuticals, had a convicted felon on its board of directors until the day before the November application was filed — and that he remains a key financier of its proposed Roxbury dispensary. Yesterday, the Herald reported another license winner, New England Treatment Access, has a management team that includes an ex-Department of Health insider who helped write the medical marijuana regulations.

And earlier this month, City Councilors Tito Jackson and Stephen J. Murphy said they were incorrectly listed as supporters of the Roxbury dispensary and a separate Back Bay shop, respectively.

In a statement, a health department spokesman reiterated that the licenses are provisional, and that the firms “must undergo a rigorous series of Department of Public Health verifications, inspections and municipal approvals before they will be allowed to open.”